"Otherwise, they will use your code and report 1) that your code does not work or that 2) their code is better because they did not use your code well."
This x 1000! This is a topic near to my heart as I've actually had people use models & software we provided to them, not making an effort to understand fundamental concepts and theory behind it (or just being incapable of understanding) and then publish papers saying our models are crap! (not even providing better ways, nor comparing to anything else, just saying 'I put in some data and the results were unrealistic, this model is bad).
I agree. I've released my code, and there are several examples of people taking it and using it to do stuff that is totally outside its range of reliability because they just ran the code and didn't bother to learn enough about the problem. Then they publish crap and the crap comes back to me because MY code gets a bad rep for creating incorrect results.
This x 1000! This is a topic near to my heart as I've actually had people use models & software we provided to them, not making an effort to understand fundamental concepts and theory behind it (or just being incapable of understanding) and then publish papers saying our models are crap! (not even providing better ways, nor comparing to anything else, just saying 'I put in some data and the results were unrealistic, this model is bad).